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Sausages, Lyons
Take six pounds of lean pork from the chine, three pounds of lean veal from the fillet, and three pounds of pork fat. Mince the lean meat finely, pound it in a mortar till smooth, and cut the fat into dice. Mix thoroughly, and season the whole with ten ounces of salt, a quarter of an ounce of saltpetre, three or four bruised shallots, half an ounce of ground pepper, and a quarter of an ounce of pepper-corns. Leave the mixture for twenty-four hours. Procure some sausage-skins, and carefully examine them to see that they are thoroughly cleansed; press the meat tightly into them, and fasten the ends securely with string. Lay the sausages in an earthen pan with salt, with a small portion of saltpetre under and over them, and let them remain for a week; take them out, and dry them in a smoke-house or in a chimney over a wood fire. Boil three or four bay-leaves, a sprig of thyme, and a few sage-leaves in some wine-lees, if procurable. Dip the sausages into this, tie the ends with fresh string, and again dry them. Wrap them in paper, and store in a dry, cool place till wanted.
This is a dry-cured, cold-smoked sausage eaten without cooking, and it is written in the pre-refrigeration idiom of "leave it a week in an earthen pan." The reading notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the method cannot be followed today.
- Why this one is out of boundsThe sausage is never brought to a safe temperature at any stage: it is salted, stuffed, held in a pan, smoked over a wood fire and then air-dried, and a dried sausage of this type would ordinarily be sliced and eaten without further cooking. Everything that makes such a product safe in modern charcuterie — a controlled fermentation, a measured drop in pH, a verified loss of water weight, a known drying temperature and humidity — is absent here.
- Raw pork and TrichinellaTwelve pounds of raw pork and veal are cured and dried without any heat step and without the freezing regime that modern practice uses on pork destined to be eaten uncooked. Salt and smoke alone were the historical safeguard, and they were an imperfect one.
- The unmeasured saltpetreSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. The quarter-ounce worked into the meat is at least a stated quantity; the "small portion of saltpetre under and over them" in the salting pan is not, and there is no way to know how much migrates into the meat. Nitrate and nitrite additions in cured meat are now controlled to parts per million precisely because the margin between curing and harm is narrow.
- Slow drying in warm airA chimney over a wood fire is a warm, variable environment. Cold-smoking and drying a stuffed sausage through the temperature range this implies is the classic setting for Staphylococcus aureus to produce a heat-stable toxin, and for Clostridium botulinum in the anaerobic centre of the casing. Neither is detectable by smell or appearance.
- Salt level tells you the intentTen ounces of salt to twelve pounds of meat is roughly five per cent — far saltier than a fresh sausage, and a deliberate preservative dose. The recipe is a preservation method first and a flavour recipe second, which is exactly why it cannot be casually reproduced.
- Vocabulary, for readingThe chine is the loin end along the backbone; the fillet of veal is the leg, not the tenderloin, in nineteenth-century butchery. Wine-lees are the sediment left in the cask after fermentation — a winemaking by-product no longer sold to households. The recipe does not say why the sausages are dipped in it.
- If you want the dishBuy saucisson de Lyon from a producer working to modern controls, or follow a current dry-curing recipe that specifies cure numbers, target pH and a percentage weight loss. This text is worth reading; it is not worth following.
Saucisson de Lyon is a classic dry sausage of the Rhône valley, from a city that built much of its culinary reputation on charcuterie and whose sausages travelled under the Lyon name well beyond France. Cassell's compilers, working in the 1870s and after for an English readership that increasingly encountered French terms on menus, included a great many such continental preparations alongside the plainest British cookery. The recipe belongs to a period when curing was a domestic winter task rather than an industrial one, and its instructions read as they do because the writer assumed a cold larder, a genuine chimney and a cook who had watched someone else do it first. Modern charcuterie replaced that inherited judgement with measurement, which is the difference between this page and a current recipe.